The Women’s Land Rights in Southern Africa Project (WOLAR) is aimed at enhancing women’s access to, ownership of, control over land and other productive resources and services in order to meet their basic livelihood needs and become more economically independent and secure.
Women’s rights to land remain a contested issue in Kenya despite the acceptance of the principle of equality of the genders in law. The 2010 Constitution of Kenya clearly provides for the principles of equality and non-discrimination at Article 27. Moreover, in the land policy principles and the national values and principles of governance, gender equality is included. Despite these clear provisions however, gender inequality in land relations persists. The patriarchal social ordering that privileges men in land holding has been a greater barrier to women’s land rights.
In Rwanda, two factors make land a highly important and contested issue. First,
Rwanda has the highest person-to-land ratio in Africa. This creates tremendous
pressure on land in a country where most of the population lives in rural areas, and
where agriculture remains the central economic activity. Second, Rwanda is recovering
from massive population shifts caused by decades of ethnic strife and the 1994 civil war
and genocide, which resulted in displaced populations and overlapping land claims.
This brief discusses a pilot intervention in Rwanda led by the Belgian
NGO, RCN Justice & Démocratie, with support from the International
Development Law Organization (IDLO) and the Belgian Government. A
more detailed and complete discussion of the pilot is given in Lankhorst
and Veldman (2011a). The pilot aimed to transform the customary
resolution of disputes involving women’s land claims concerning
inheritance or marital relations. The intervention examined whether
and to what extent it was possible to increase the scope for acceptance
In Asia, land issues affect women in ways that call for serious deliberation and action. Suffice it to say, the legitimate concerns of females transcend generations and geographical borders. Attaining a stable livelihood, meeting basic resource needs and having adequate housing are just some of the issues that affect women. There is, however, a pressing need to heed the woes of rural women in particular. The poor are swelling in numbers and the condition of poor rural women lies on the fringes of the global economic agenda.
This issue brief highlights the challenges women are facing on access to lands, and the strategies in achieving gender justice for land rights - based from the results of the scoping studies on women and land in seven Asian countries (Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Nepal, Pakistan, and Philippines).
Land is an important asset for rural households, and having secure land rights is important for poverty reduction. Despite the large body of literature on the relationship between land tenure security, livelihoods, and poverty, most of this literature is based on household-level data and does not consider possible intrahousehold inequalities in land ownership.
Across the developing world, rural women suffer widespread gender-based discrimination in laws, customs and practices cause severe inequalities in their ability to access, control, own and use land and limit their participation in decision-making at all levels of land governance.
In the six months since the coronavirus began its global spread, more than 15 million people have been diagnosed with COVID-19 and more than 600,000 have perished, causing governments around the world to institute lockdowns and shut down businesses while entire industries have been devastated.
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